Making your needs clear to your boss is the best way to ease your transition into motherhood.Getty Images

Before she got pregnant in 2011, Allyson Downey had never met an obstacle she couldn’t overcome. If she had a problem in her finance career, she thought her way through it.

“I was good at hitting walls,” says Downey, a Columbia Business School graduate who was living in New York at the time and working in business development at Credit Suisse Group. “I would knock it down, climb under it, scale it. But this is one thing I couldn’t do anything about.” That one thing was being placed on total bed rest at 23 weeks, after developing serious complications that threatened the life of her baby.

Even though she’d be confined to bed all day, it was feasible for her to keep working remotely. She sent an e-mail to her manager at Credit Suisse, explaining the situation and letting him know her intention to keep working. There was no response. She followed up multiple times. Nothing.

Allyson Downey, author of “Here’s the Plan.”Allison Hooban

“I never heard from them again,” says Downey, now 36 and living in Boulder, Colo., with her husband and two children. “I thought that because I had excelled, when I hit that wall, someone would give me a leg up, a boost over it. And now, I couldn’t get my phone calls returned by my manager to talk about how to deal with this. No one bothered to ask me what I wanted, even though there was nothing more that I wanted than to keep working.”

She put out feelers on the job market when her son was 4 weeks old, and quickly landed a job in the nonprofit world. “It was a relief, but still disappointing that I hadn’t been able to succeed in changing attitudes toward women who were pregnant,” says Downey, who went on to co-launch weeSpring, a kind of Yelp for baby products.

One of those keys to success, says Downey, is communicating with your manager throughout the pregnancy, rather than leaving it to the last minute. “Speak up about what you want [during maternity leave and the transition back to the office],” she says. “The reality is that people look at pregnant women with a lot of assumptions: ‘She won’t want to take on this project because she’s pregnant.’ ‘When she’s back at work, she won’t want to travel.’ That kind of benevolent discrimination can wind up harming your career. Employers need to check their assumptions, and women should be deliberate about communicating what it is that they want.”

But limit discussions regarding your plans to short-term increments, Downey notes. “And err on the side of more responsibility, not less. You can back away if you need to, but if you don’t put a date on things, people will think the plans are set in stone. Talk in three-month terms.”

Additionally, Downey urges women not to forget their co-workers — the people who will be taking up the slack during a maternity leave. “Take the time to show your appreciation for them. It’s going to help avoid some of the resentment that can bubble up,” says Downey. “The people who are covering for you, do everything you can to set them up for success.”

Last, but not least, make sure you invest plenty of time in finding a child-care solution that works for you — while also realizing there will be the days where it all goes completely haywire. “Make sure you’ve got a backup to your backup to your backup. I think the correct number is six,” says Downey with a laugh. “Six people in your phone who might be able to jump in at the last minute.”